1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to gateway devices for network communication, and particularly to a gateway device for Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) networks.
2. Description of Related Art
Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) is beginning to replace the currently used Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4). However, at present, only some parts of the Internet uses IPv6 , while the main part of the Internet still uses IPv4 . This situation is described as “IPv6 islands in an IPv4 sea”.
IPv6's rapid deployment tunnel technology is often used to enable the main part of Internet using IPv4 (i.e., above IPv4 sea) and the parts of Internet using IPv6 (i.e., above IPv6 islands) to communicate with each other. A gateway device supporting IPv6's rapid deployment tunnel technology can communicate with the IPv6 islands, and client computers in the IPv4 sea can access the IPv6 islands through the gateway device. However, when a gateway device synchronously communicates with more than one IPv6 island using IPv6's rapid deployment tunnel technology, the gateway device may be unable to distinguish Router Solicit (RS) messages for accessing different IPv6 islands sent from client computers. Thus, a plurality of client computers in the IPv4 sea using the gateway device to access the IPv6 islands can only access one of the IPv6 islands through the gateway device, and are unable to respectively access different IPv6 islands through the gateway device.
Therefore, there is room for improvement within the art.